Many factors contribute to the increasing complexity of business IT environments today; the rapid adoption of cloud computing, big data and mobile device proliferation to name a few. These and other key trends are tho’ are making it harder for organizations to effectively and efficiently manage and secure the environment and to assure IT service levels and business success.
Newer requirements include controlling mobile devices, maintaining visibility into virtualized resources and services, and achieving increasingly demanding SLAs for critical business applications. Effective IT service management becomes more challenging when services are reliant on dynamically shared resources and when some resources are on-premise and some are in a public cloud.
Meeting these challenges has often been labor intensive and costly because the available IT management tools have been narrowly focused and poorly integrated. This post outlines key management concerns and identifies what IT professionals should look for when determining the best approach to addressing management complexity.
Factors Driving Change
Cloud computing, mobility and big data are being adopted by enterprises of all sizes. However delivering the benefits reliably and consistently across a distributed organization often requires a complex combination of infrastructure and support technologies.
Cloud Computing – The cloud is growing in popularity because it provides organizations with faster access to applications and services while reducing the development cost. However, as these applications and services get integrated into existing processes and with existing applications, both the new and the old need to be managed together. New tools are needed to manage cloud infrastructures and applications, but these cannot be separate from the tools managing legacy applications and the existing infrastructure. More tools equal more complexity, increased staffing requirements and lower efficiency.
Mobility – Employees today need to be able to work remotely – from home and from the road. Sometimes they use company owned and provided devices and sometimes they prefer to use their own devices (commonly called Bring Your Own Device – BYOD. Who wants to carry two smart phones these days, supporting separate contact lists and email accounts?) As a result companies have to provide management solutions that address both of these scenarios. For company owned devices, secure access, data back-up and loss prevention are critical issues. For BYOD, the same things are important but it’s also necessary to distinguish between personal files – contact, photo’s, calendar – and business information, so that the loss of the device doesn’t necessarily mean loss of personal information.
Big Data – For most small and mid-sized businesses, refers to working with and obtaining results from the analysis of large and complex data sets provided by Saas companies, third party vendors and service providers. For example, utilizing social media data to identify market opportunities and target prospects. The issue is that big data fosters changes in company operational approaches and increases the number and type of users who need information access. This increases the number of users, the types of devices, the network traffic, the importance of data integrity, the need for system reliability and performance, the volume of stored data, the number of application interactions…. the infrastructure becomes more complex and now carries more information vital to business success. Accordingly system management and the maintenance of service levels become increasingly important too.
Management Impact
The management implication is that the new capabilities need to be managed along with legacy infrastructures and applications in an integrated, automated fashion. Integration is important because new and legacy resources together deliver services to the business. Understanding relationships, dependencies, security, and performance is vital to meeting business service commitments. Automation is important because of the increasing complexity and growing number of management tasks which can no longer be managed with manual approaches.
In fact, IT management can itself become a big a data problem. The scale of data created from IT management systems – the collection of frequently polled device management data, events, logs, etc. is very significant. Real-time analysis and reporting on this data are required to make the actionable decisions necessary to keep the new “hybrid” IT environments performing and meeting needs of the business.
What to look for in an IT management solution
What’s needed is an integrated, comprehensive and cloud-based management tool, with extensive automation capabilities. Tools should meet the following three requirements. Be able to:
- Manage cloud infrastructure and application services along with legacy on-premise services with an integrated management system, all within a single command center.
- Manage company-owned and employee-owned mobile devices, along with traditional end user clients, as part of an integrated management solution, including the ability to remotely access devices anytime, anywhere.
- Automate every manual, repetitive task possible to maximize IT efficiency and reduce human error.
Kaseya’s IT management solution integrates a wide range of management capabilities to enable IT organizations and MSPs to command everything within IT centrally, to manage remote and distributed environments with ease, and to automate all aspects of IT management, delivering higher service quality and greater IT efficiency. Kaseya enables IT professionals to manage all aspects of the IT environment – including on-premise, cloud, hybrid-cloud, virtualized, distributed and mobile components. And Kaseya’s solution itself is delivered via the Kaseya IT management cloud or as on-premise software.
Author: Ray Wright
